9
Meditation in Everyday Life
Integrating meditation into your everyday life is
simple. Just make the promise to yourself that any
night when you haven't done your meditation,
you won't dare to go to bed!
Phrarajbhavanajarn
Vice-Abbot of Wat Phra Dhammakaya
Our meditation and our everyday life affect each other mutually. Improvements in your meditation will serve to improve your everyday life and vise-versa. Don't be surprised if the ups and downs of everyday life seem to affect how you meditate. It is a pitfall of beginners to feel that they are making no progress or that theirmeditation is even getting worse as time goes on. However, solace can be taken in reminding oneself that many more factors affect the quality of our meditation than meet the eye. The best we can do is to make the effort to be observant about the possible connections between our inner and outer lives.
Try to notice the things that put you in the mood for meditation and the things that seem to make it more difficult for you to meditate.
There are several tips for 'meditation homework' which you might like to try to keep up the subtle state of mind throughout your non-meditating hours. Of these, particularly influentual are 'keeping a meditation diary' and 'remembering to bring your mind back to the center of your body for one minute every hour.
Keeping a meditation diary means keeping short notes written after each session while the inner experience is still fresh in the mind. This personal record will prove invaluable over a long period of time. You will find that learning how to optimize everyday life to help your meditation is an art in itself-a sophisticated science that goes beyond the scope of this book but which can be studied on courses held in many of the centers mentioned at the end of this book.
As for keeping your mind at the center of your body for one minute of every hour, one way to remind yourself to keen up this practice is to set an hourly alarm on your wristwatch or cellphone to give an audible 'beep' on the hour.
In general if you are the sort of person who is kind and ready to help other people then it will help your meditation. At the same time one should be responsible for the human dignity of oneself and others and upholding an economy that is ethically fair. If you follow these norms of behaviour, you will find that your meditation improves a lot.
As mentioned at the beginning of this book, there are some disadvantages in learning meditation from a book rather than directly from a teacher. These disadvantages are not insurmountable, and the knowledge and techniques contained in this book are sufficient for you to practice meditation and progress without hindrance up to the stage where your meditation becomes stable. Your aim in meditation should be to attain a clear counter-image inside which is as clear as a diamond and as bright as the midday sun, permanent in your mind so that you can see it with your eyes open or closed, the whole of the time.
